This thesis presents a recollection of developments and results towards the research of human-like semantic understanding of the environment for robotics systems. Achieving a level of understanding in robots comparable to humans has proven to be a significant challenge in robotics, although modern sensors like stereo cameras and neuromorphic cameras enable robots to perceive the world in a manner akin to human senses, extracting and interpreting semantic information proves to be significantly inefficient by comparison. This thesis explores different aspects of the machine vision field to level computational methods in order to address real-life challenges for the task of semantic scene understanding in both everyday environments as well as challenging unstructured environments. 

The works included in this thesis present key contributions towards three main research directions. The first direction establishes novel perception algorithms for object detection and localization, aimed at real-life deployments in onboard mobile devices for %perceptually degraded unstructured environments. Along this direction, the contributions focus on the development of robust detection pipelines as well as fusion strategies for different sensor modalities including stereo cameras, neuromorphic cameras, and LiDARs. 

The second research direction establishes a computational method for levering semantic information into meaningful knowledge representations to enable human-inspired behaviors for the task of traversability estimation for reactive navigation. The contribution presents a novel decay function for traversability soft image generation based on exponential decay, by fusing semantic and geometric information to obtain density images that represent the pixel-wise traversability of the scene. Additionally, it presents a novel Encoder-Decoder lightweight network architecture for coarse semantic segmentation of terrain, integrated with a memory module based on a dynamic certainty filter.

Finally, the third research direction establishes the novel concept of Belief Scene Graphs, which are utility-driven extensions of partial 3D scene graphs, that enable efficient high-level task planning with partial information.The research thus presents an approach to meaningfully incorporate unobserved objects as nodes into an incomplete 3D scene graph using the proposed method Computation of Expectation based on Correlation Information (CECI), to reasonably approximate the probability distribution of the scene by learning histograms from available training data. Extensive simulations and real-life experimental setups support the results and assumptions presented in this work.